As we mentioned last week, monitoring tools for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms like Microsoft Office 365 are gaining popularity. These cloud services are becoming mission-critical, and the proper management of them will become as important as making sure the backups are running properly.
Among the latest moves: ManageEngine has enhanced its Applications Manager platform to oversee performance monitoring for Office 365. This new capabilities, available for beta testing, will enable enterprise IT operations teams to gain visibility into the performance of their online collaboration tools as well as applications in the Office 365 suite, the company claims. Details surfaced at this week's Microsoft Ignite 2017 customer conference.
Among the key questions: Can MSPs actually monetize Office 365 performance monitoring -- over and above what they already charge for base system monitoring?
Office 365 Cloud Performance Monitoring Defined
Before you answer that question, perhaps a closer look at ManageEngine's feature list will provide more perspective. According to the company, the latest monitoring capabilities in Applications Manager can assist IT personnel with:
- Understanding a holistic picture of the health and performance of Office 365 deployments and associated services using custom, interactive dashboards.
- The ability to diagnose common performance issues in Office 365, drill down to their root cause and resolve them to ensure ongoing service delivery.
- Gathering long-term data and presenting reports for Exchange Online, such as mailbox statistics, Exchange Online service health, endpoint connectivity and dozens of other details.
- Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) of Office 365, including metrics related to the health of Office 365 services such as Microsoft StaffHub, Identity Service, Office 365 portal, etc. It also tracks endpoint connectivity, response time and configuration.
- Staying on top of service incidents and improve their internal support experience.
ManageEngine Applications Manager already offers application performance monitoring for over 100 out-of-the-box enterprise technologies from companies like VMWare, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. The company states that the software helps businesses ensure high availability and performance for their business applications by ensuring servers and applications have high uptime. I suspect Office 365 is the first of many SaaS platforms the company plans to support.
